Growth requires more women in EU’s workforce

International Women’s Day is the right time to discuss gender imbalance.

European Voice

3/7/12, 10:10 PM CET

Updated 1/22/16, 12:41 PM CET

The representation of women in company boardrooms is not the biggest or most immediate problem facing women. But in suggesting the possibility of mandatory quotas for women on corporate boards, Viviane Reding, the European commissioner for justice, fundamental rights and citizenship, is flagging up an important, symbolic issue.

She is signalling that questions about a fair distribution of economic influence have not been strong enough to bring about substantial change in the workplace.

The Commission itself knows something about the under-representation of women. Its own ratio of women in management was improved, paradoxically, by national quotas. When the EU was enlarged in 2004, it needed to rebalance the national distribution of positions in its own staff. Since there were proportionally more women among the recruits from central and eastern Europe than in the Commission as a whole, women’s representation in middle and senior management improved.

Other public bodies and private companies will not have such luck. For women, what emerges from central and eastern Europe – or, more particularly, the economic transition of Europe’s post-communist countries – is an uncomfortable lesson about how vulnerable women are to economic crises.

Today, 8 March, is International Women’s Day. Communist celebrations of this day were long marred by kitsch, and the much-parodied celebratory images of female tractor drivers barely disguised an eternal truth: that women have always done much of the drudgery, and that their working day does not end in the field, factory or office.

Nonetheless, other images from the era reflected real advances. Many women worked in the bloc’s many high-quality research institutes. The near-total participation of women in the labour market was enforced, but it gave women a measure of financial independence and experience in the leading parts of the economy. It was accompanied by a comprehensive child-care system.

The transition from communism brought set-backs. Child-care systems were eroded. The number of women in employment fell sharply, so that the gap between men and women in work is now wider in Poland, for example, than in Germany and France. And a disproportionate number of women were impoverished by the transition. That experience suggests how shallow egalitarianism can be, how brittle women’s advances can be – and that, in periods of tough change, women are hit first.

In parts of northern Europe – notably Scandinavia – women’s advances are perhaps well-established enough to limit the risks posed by temporary economic downswings. In some post-communist countries, the economic crisis is primarily an additional complication to women’s challenges, to recover some of the ground lost in their countries’ economic transition and to take the best of other countries’ practices.

The bigger question – shared across Europe – is how economies can boost growth when they discriminate against women. The EU’s quest is for a knowledge-based economy. Yet, while more women than men now go to university, women have fewer jobs, lose jobs first, and have less power. We know too that Europe’s population is ageing fast. Yet most national governments are not doing enough to make the best use of the potential labour that they already have, improving the participation of women in the workforce.

The need for economic growth is now strongest in southern Europe, a region where the active workforce happens – by coincidence or otherwise – to be predominantly male. In Italy, just 46.6% of women were part of the labour force in 2007 – that is, before the crisis – compared with 70.7% of men. In Greece, the rate was 47.9%, compared with 74.9% for men. In the EU, as a whole, 58.3% of women were in employment; in Denmark, the rate was 73.2%.

In their different ways, both Scandinavia and the ex-communist Europe show what might be possible for female participation in the workforce. If western Europe, which has latterly embraced International Women’s Day, cannot make use of those examples, then the European economy will continue to struggle.